“My work is to enter people’s lives with my music,” says Canadian singer Céline Dion in her 2005 biography, For Keeps. “Do you think I want to disturb them when they bake? Do you think I want to disturb them when they make love? I want to be part of it. I don’t want to interrupt.”
The quote reappears in Carl Wilson’s 2013 book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, an investigation into why many people enjoy music that so many other people — critics, mainly — think is terrible. Dion’s quote is part of the answer: the more music intrudes on people’s lives, the less welcome it is. To be successful then, is to be an invisible accessory.
Sydney trio RÜFÜS make efficient, highly-functional dance pop. They are incredibly popular. Their previous album, 2013’s Atlas, debuted in Australia at No 1 and went gold (sales over 35,000).
Their second album Bloom’s first single, You Were Right, a swishy electro nod to UK producer George FitzGerald’s 2015 hit Full Circle (a reference point throughout Bloom) has already won best dance single at the Arias. They’re a premium live draw and a regular big-tent headliner at festivals. They are very good at getting you on the dance floor. What you do there is up to you. Because RÜFÜS are also exceptionally talented at not interrupting.
Bloom is proof. A lush update on Atlas, it is a sensitive reading of the floor from their perch. Dappled, house-inflected dance music laden with glassy pads, electronic marimbas, percolating synth bass and the odd dolphin sound, in case you missed the album’s underwater-themed memo. (Looking for inspiration in searching sea creatures online, the group settled on Bloom as a title after discovering it’s the collective noun for jellyfish. Which, the cranks will tell you, is also a group of malleable indistinguishable vessels with no brain.)
“Until the sun needs to rise,” sings frontman Tyrone Lindqvist on the twilight groove of Until The Sun Needs To Rise, sounding a fair bit like the genre’s current overlord, Chet Faker. “We sleep until the morning comes, so don’t you open your eyes, ‘til it’s done”. It casts a foot-tapping spell but it also literally describes sleep.
Be With You is an effervescent cocktail-party-cum-club-jam, complete with background party people having a chat. Like An Animal ripples with plastic guitars and stuttering hi-hats, evoking both the promise of early evening hedonism and the best of Van She. Few require depth in their dance music, but that’s just what makes it such fertile ground for declarations of character. Think of Hot Chip’s twitch. The Presets’ glare. Peaches’ jizz. RÜFÜS remain absent even as they set the nation’s beer gardens alight.
Bloom’s highlights come from RÜFÜS’s attractive melancholic sheen, which doesn’t arrive until late in the album. Hypnotised, featuring bruised guest vocals from actress and DJ, Dena Amy, sweetly dips just where the drop is expected.
The spacey house of Lose My Head wades into darker depths until the album finally blossoms with closing track Innerbloom. A near-ten minute swim through woozy synths unspooling towards a perfectly weighted anthem of the interior, Innerbloom is easily Bloom’s high-water mark, and will surely stand as their signpost for future exploration.
“That was one of the quickest songs to be written for the album,” recall the band in their press release. “Weirdly, we had a lot of clarity in what we wanted to get out of it.” Weirdly, it’s the sound of RÜFÜS finally nailing the profundity that had eluded them.
“But!” they may also protest. “Do you think we want to disturb them while they dance?”
